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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully these services can be restored in 3.5 years. One of the greatest things to happen to aging infrastructure of this country in the last 10 years as a lot of our systems are based on aging military systems.

We just need it, there’s no question of the benefits and there were no negatives to speak about.

Thank you President Barack Obama! A true leader and patriot.

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>Hopefully these services can be restored in 3.5 years

I am not sure it works like that. Destruction is easy, building is hard.

True, but software is slightly easier to restore service to than a razed physical building, for example. The support/staff/operations part still takes time and resources, but it is a little easier.

I mean, I liked what they made but its kinda sad that greatest thing to happen to our nation's infrastructure was some nice websites.

Meanwhile, healthcare housing and education got way more expensive and taxes for the wealthy went down.

USDS was borne out of the healthcare.gov debacle, which resulted in providing affordable healthcare to millions of uninsured people. They may not have had an equivalent sized win yet but they have tremendous accomplishments for a tiny organization.

And a lot of bridges fell into disrepair, roads get worse, etc. Gridlock has made funding anything pretty hard in the last decade, and certain parties are so anti spending they won't try to fix it

Anti spending? The deficit has increased under every republican president almost back to ww2. Their two Santa strategy seems to work well confusing people though.

Yeah but mostly tax cuts and MIC contributions, they're not paying for local development or education or so on

/? https://www.google.com/search?q=The+deficit+has+increased+un... :

- History of the United States public debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...

- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/rep... (2019) :

> The deficit is the difference between the money that the government makes and the money it spends. If the government spends more than it collects in revenues, then it’s running a deficit.

> The federal debt is the running total of the accumulated deficits. [Or surpluses]

"Federal Surplus or Deficit [-] (FYFSD)" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD#

"Federal Surplus or Deficit [-] as Percent of Gross Domestic Product (FYFSGDA188S)" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S

> and certain parties are so anti spending they won't try to fix it

It's one certain party, and the situation is worse than that -- they don't want any of the opposing party's legislation succeed that would be recognized by the people as a good thing and make that party look good.

This is why partisan politics is a pox on the people -- loyalty to party over country is literally treason but is celebrated by party members.

Lol anti spending but they're about to pass a bill adding 2 trillion to the deficit

Isn’t that just to cut taxes for the rich?

Yep. The only real cuts I see are cutting medical care for the poorest of the poor.

and when Biden/Obama admins did actually fix a bunch of infrastructure, half the voting public didn't give a shit

That's what happens when parties govern by executive fiat instead of relying on legislation for things like that. Things rammed through by flimsy executive action are fragile and easy for the next administration to cancel.

We could have higher taxes on the wealthy and good healthcare. But to do that, the side that claims they want that and that they believe in "democracy" would have to not only post on Bluesky about it, they'd have to (A) vote, and (B) convince (rather than demonize) the moderates who are skeptical of them. We'll see in a while if they learned that lesson from 2024.

In a two party system voting is very simple: one must vote for the least bad candidate or suffer the consequences of the worse candidate taking office.

It stinks and we should change it, but until then one needs to do a simple weighing of options and cast a best effort ballot.

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